


the vicious elation of well-intended destruction

by agentx13



Category: Captain America (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: F/M, Kidnapping, Killing, but he can't bring them back from the dead, sharon carter month, steve can complain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27976254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentx13/pseuds/agentx13
Summary: No one expected Faustus's obsession with Sharon Carter would ever help Sharon's enemies take over her universe, but no one expected Sharon's anger, either.
Relationships: Sharon Carter/Steve Rogers
Kudos: 12
Collections: Sharon Carter Month





	the vicious elation of well-intended destruction

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Jackie for helping me with the idea!

It pains her to think of all the times she’s nearly escaped. Between the drugs and the dreams, there are times she swears she’s made it out, but then she wakes up in the room again, the room with her clothes neatly hanging in the closet, her clothes neatly folded in their drawers, the report she’d been reading before bed on her side table. It looks like her home. It looks just as she left it.

But there’s no Steve, and the smell is different, and the curtains are drawn, no sunlight sneaking through from the other side, and there’s a taste in her mouth. And she knows. She knows she hasn’t escaped yet.

Yet. Because she will not give up, and she will not accept defeat. She is no one’s prisoner, not anymore.

She loses track of how many times she’s tried to escape, how many times she’s thought she’s succeeded, how many times she’s woken up here again with that same faintly acidic taste in her mouth determined to try again, and then, finally, one time she opens her eyes and her vision is blurry and her eyelids are heavy. Her breath catches. Is this it?

She’s on a small bed in a white hospital gown. She’s got a feeding tube sticking out of her nostril. There’s a needle in her arm attached to a tube. A chair is beside the bed. Along with a book on… the science of thought control? She’d gone too easy on him last time.

She forces herself to sit up, grimacing and shuddering as she carefully pulls out the needle and the feeding tube. She’s going to kill him.

But she has to get out first. She has no idea how long she’s been under, but sitting up made her dizzy. Not a good sign.

She goes through the drawers. She could have sworn before that these were her clothes, but she sees now that they’re empty. The clothes in her closet that she’d thought were dresses are several nurses uniforms. And yep. She’s going to kill him.

She finds modern-day scrubs and leans against the wall as she pulls them on, forcing the dizziness and nausea aside through sheer force of will. She grabs some of the orthopedic shoes from the closet, vowing to get a change of clothes and some boots as soon as she can, and works on getting the hell out.

* * *

She’s still wiping the guards’ blood off her fists when she hits the street and frowns. Something’s wrong. This isn’t the New York she knows. It’s dark and eerily quiet. There are no sirens, but there should be. There are always sirens in New York, there’s always noise. There are always scores of people. Sharon steps back into the shadows. There’s rubbish and refuse everywhere. The streetlights are out. The few people on the street keep their heads down and hurry along their way. There should be sirens, she thinks. Why aren’t there sirens?

She memorizes the address of the building where she’d been kept and gets moving. Several blocks away, she breaks into a store, steals some leggings and other clothes in her size. Shirt, jacket, socks, boots. None of her usual equipment, yet, but she’ll find something la-

She stops, dropping to a crouch on the floor. Someone was here. She wasn’t entirely sure how she knew – she didn’t remember hearing anything, but since Shuri had restored her to her youth – Sharon was… well. A better version of herself. Maybe even the best version of herself.

“I saw you.” The voice is soft. Male. Familiar?

She slowly straightens, searching the shadows for the source. Her breath catches in her throat. She knows that short brown hair, that garish suit with the regenerative properties that help keep him alive, despite all odds. She and Steve had _known_ he was alive out there somewhere. She steps toward him. “Ian?”

He stares at her. His mace lowers in surprise, then lifts again as his face hardens. She freezes. “You’re not her.” His voice is flat.

She grins, trying not to worry. What’s happened since she was taken? “I know, I know. I’m younger now. It’s a long story. But I’m still your mother. Can I hug you now or what?”

He expression falters. “I need to show you something. Don’t let anyone see you. _Anyone,_ understand?” He looks around and grabs a hooded sweatshirt from a nearby rack and tosses it to her.

She nods and puts the sweatshirt on underneath the jacket. When she’s done, she pulls the hood over her head. She doesn’t know what’s going on, but she trusts Ian. So she walks with him as they go from shadow to shadow, into the sewers and out again, into a building in the slums. 

Once inside, he speaks quietly, the rats scurrying away from them. “I knew there was something in that building important to Faustus. I was going to attack, but- but if you’re you, Mom, we’ve got a problem. A big problem. But I need you here first.” He takes a breath and raps his knuckles against a door. He glances at her, then pushes the door open. “Ellie? I brought someone I think you should meet.”

Confused, Sharon follows him inside. There’s a girl with blonde hair lying on a cot on the floor. She looks… familiar. Weirdly familiar.

The girl looks at her, her brow caked in sweat, her blue eyes (familiar, familiar, familiar) pained. She blinks. “Mom?”

Sharon blinks back. 

“Multiverse,” Ian explains. “There’s one where Hydra won. That universe’s version of you and Dad had a daughter. Ellie.”

Sharon sinks to her knees beside the cot, and Ellie grabs her hand, tears in her eyes. Even if Sharon didn’t believe them, she wouldn’t be able to pull her hand away from someone so clearly in need. But she _does_ believe them. Those are Steve’s eyes, Sharon’s chin and cheekbones. “What happened?”

“She was infected by a symbiote, then shot. The symbiote is stopping the bleeding, but it isn’t healing her.” The frustration in his voice is palpable. “And it won’t let me do anything. Whenever I try to help her, it attacks me.”

Sharon frowns. Underneath the sheet covering the girl, there’s a patch that’s higher than the rest. Gently, she pulls back the sheet. A white sweater with the shoulders cut out, much like her old uniform, but cut off at the midriff. And over her stomach, a bandage. She can smell the blood and pus. “How long have you been here?”

“Almost a week. Things were already bad when we got here. The Avengers were gone. SHIELD was gone.”

Right. SHIELD fell after he left. She nods. She doesn’t have time to focus on the sinking feeling in her gut, how she’s been out of commission for at least a week straight, why Ian had wanted her hidden. “First things first. Show me what tools you were using.”

* * *

In the end, she sends him out for more. Things to numb the area, things to put Ellie to sleep. Dealing with the symbiote is predictably harder. Sharon knows that most symbiotes will take a threat as just that, a threat, and so instead, she talks to it, explaining what she’s doing and how important it is for Ellie to survive if the symbiote wants a host. Sharon isn’t known for her persuasion skills – she’s more like a carpenter, using the tools she has access to in order to build the situation she wants. But that won’t work here, where she has to convince the symbiote that letting her and Ian help Ellie is the best option for everyone. It’s a gamble, but it seems to work. Once the symbiote pulls back enough to let Sharon remove the bandage, she works for hours, her fingers caked in blood and worse. The symbiote must have kept necrotic tissue at bay, but it had also prevented healing, and Ellie had desperately needed healing.

At last, with Ellie stitched up, she sits heavily on the floor. “She’ll need rest. Frankly, so do I.” She cleans her hands with the alcoholic wipes Ian had found – there’s no running water in the building. “I did what I could.” And her eyelids are drooping. She doesn’t know how long she’d slept before she’d woken up, but it was definitely enough to do a number on her.

“I’ll stand guard,” Ian says. “We’ll talk when you wake.”

“Damn straight.” She leans against the wall and is instantly asleep.

* * *

She wakes hours later; Ellie is still asleep, and Sharon checks on the stitches and her temperature.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Ian asks.

“I had medical training with SHIELD. And then… I’ve been doing more in the field after it fell. Did some research. Never know how far you’ll be from help, you know?” She looks at him. His face is worn, his eyes haunted in ways they hadn’t been even in Dimension Z. “What happened out there, Ian? Do you know?”

He doesn’t want to tell her. Despite how much he’s changed, she knows him. “You did, Mom.”

* * *

By the time Ellie wakes, Sharon knows enough to be horrified. Ian had told her about Ellie’s universe, Hydra’s success, her own and Steve’s deaths. He’s told her that in this universe, her own universe, there’s a version of her, someone with her face and voice, working with the Red Skull to secure his power and now standing at the Red Skull’s side. No wonder Ian hadn’t wanted anyone to see her.

The Avengers are gone. The X-Men are gone. And Sharon thinks she knows how. No, she _knows_ how. She’d worked on those plans herself, back when they were only contingencies. She’d never thought anyone would ever use them, though, not when they realized how much the Avengers and X-Men fought amongst themselves, and occasionally fought each other.

“We’re getting them back,” she says, her voice firm. “Steve. The Avengers. The X-Men. All of them.” Both Ian and Ellie look at her with a hope and appreciation and despair that says they’ve heard such promises before.

Sharon covers Ellie’s hand with hers. “You and I need to get back into shape. Ian says you can control your symbiote?”

“I have my parents’ willpower,” she says dryly.

Sharon grins. “Good. I want to teach it how to heal you if you get hurt again. For now, you need to rest.”

* * *

It’s three months of training and collecting intel before Sharon decides they’re ready. Daily training sessions, daily rundowns of what she remembers about their enemies, daily lessons in what they may come up against. Every day for three months, and it’s finally time.

“We’re going to free Dad?” Ellie asks hopefully. “I mean, Steve?”

“No.” Sharon pulls a piece of paper toward her. She’s already sketched out the Capitol, where the Red Skull has set up shop. “If they’re still alive, they’ll be on the Raft. And we can’t get to the Raft without going through the people in power. I know you’ve both been taught not to kill.”

They look at each other, and Sharon nods.

“I need you to know that I’m not a stickler for leaving people alive like Steve is. The goal here to get them out of power. We have to make sure they’re not a threat to us or anyone we care about. However you feel you need to do that, you do it. You can’t accomplish anything if you’re dead.” She pauses. “Don’t tell your father I said that. Now let’s go to the plan.”

* * *

She’d called it a ‘plan.’ Others would call it lunacy. But Sharon had always been that way where her own plans were concerned. Give her a team, and she’ll plot everything out to the last detail. But when she has a team, it means she has intel and resources. When it’s just her, though, it tends to mean she doesn’t have that intel, and she doesn’t have those resources. And now, even with her children, she doesn’t have the luxury of a fully-formed plan. For her children’s sake, she wishes she did.

All she has is hope and a heartfelt desire to put the Skull’s cabal in the ground once and for all.

So she sneaks around on the streets, tries to get into a government building. With how obvious she’s being, she’s quickly recognized and quickly captured. She gives as much struggle as her younger self might have given if her younger self had also been weakened by being kept in a medical coma and allows herself to be overcome. She doesn’t see Ian and Ellie take the place of some of the HYDRA goons taking her in, but she trusts them to stick to the plan.

She’s taken directly to the Capitol, then to Faustus’s quarters, where she’s handcuffed to a chair. And then the waiting begins. It’s meant to be a sort of torture. She wants to say it won’t work on her, but it does. The questions come just as they have for the past three months. Is Steve alive? How are Ian and Ellie faring? How many people has the Skull killed? The longer she’s left alone, the more questions she has, and no answers. All she knows is that someone stole her face to make it happen. And she thinks she knows where they got her face. SHIELD might have been dismantled, but she’s willing to bet many of its belongings had been sold on the black market. And she knows one person who would love to have a Sharon Carter LMD.

Faustus arrives, playing with his pipe. “You’ve caused me quite some trouble, young lady.” His voice is fond beneath its disciplinarian tone.

She’s going to kill him. “Where’s Steve?”

“Not here.” He pulls a chair toward her.

“Is he alive?”

He doesn’t answer right away, deliberating. “No,” he says at last.

“Good,” she growls. “Then he won’t have to be disappointed.”

“How do you-”

He can’t speak any more than that. She’s stronger than she used to be. And angrier. The chair is made of wood; the arms break off when she stands, and she drives the ends of the broken arms into his throat, keeping them there as blood fills his throat and he gurgles helplessly, his hands twitching.

“You’ve had too many chances,” she says softly. She waits until he goes still, then pulls the chair arms out again, trying to ignore the feeling of them scraping against his bones. She searches his pockets and pulls out the cuff keys, taking off the remains of her handcuffs and tossing them aside.

She goes to the door, takes a breath, and then begins her rampage.

* * *

She finds Ellie’s trail, the remnants of webbing and a string of injured or dead men. There are signs that Ian is with her, judging by the blunt force trauma. She feels a faint thrill of savage pride; they known what’s on the line and are doing what they feel they must in order to keep another world from falling to Hydra. And they’re sticking together. Good. Even better, they’ll be on their way to finding the Skull and putting him out of commission once and for all. As much as she appreciates Steve’s way of doing things, Steve isn’t here. She doesn’t think he’s dead – despite everything they’ve been through, or perhaps because of it, she thinks she would know if he were dead. But he isn’t here. And if she had just killed the Skull and Faustus years ago… well. They wouldn’t be in this mess.

She needs to find her LMD. Honestly, SHIELD needs a better way of destroying its assets when it falls. It’s fallen often enough to have established better protocols by now.

The fact that the world is in this position because they let Faustus get his hands on one of Sharon’s LMDs, probably showing the Skull to boast, is all the more reason why SHIELD needs better plans. But nooooooo, people had decided that Sharon wouldn’t make a good enough Director. Pfft.

She follows the trail Ian and Ellie have left. They’re headed toward one of the hubs of the Capitol. The Skull only fights alone if he has no other choice. Like any Nazi coward, he feels safer in a crowd with others to take the heat.

She follows the trail to a control center and slows her steps.

“You may as well come out, Agent Carter,” the Skull calls. “We have your cohorts already.”

Crap. Sharon reviews her time with the Skull. He’s inclined toward trickery, but he’s rarely an out-and-out liar.

She steps into the room. Ian and Ellie have been forced into separate corners of the room, Ian nursing a shoulder wound and watched over by Crossbones. Ellie is pinned down by several other symbiotes.

As Sharon watches, Crossbones shoots Ian in the leg; Ian grunts and falls to the floor, and Sharon clenches her jaw.

Months ago, she wouldn’t have been aware of it, but now she can sense the threat behind her. She’d talked about the spider sense with some of the spider… family? People? But it wasn’t that. It’s more a full awareness of her surroundings. So she knows. And she throws herself back.

Months ago, she would have been slower. Now? She’s not slow. And she’s angry. And she’s so, so, _so_ done.

The fight is quick. She doesn’t have mercy because the LMD has her face. If anything, that’s all the more reason _not_ to have mercy. It isn’t as if she hasn’t fought herself during training before, and it’s not as if she can ignore what part her LMD played in this. There’s a vicious elation in destroying a worse version of herself.

She gets the gun away and blows her LMD’s head off, then, before he can realize she won’t have mercy, she shoots Crossbones in the head, too. She turns to look at the symbiotes. “I recommend you run. I have business with your boss, not you.”

After several seconds, the symbiotes creep away.

She looks up at the Skull. “So Faustus says you killed Steve.” She toys with her LMD’s gun. “But we both know you wouldn’t do that. As much as you want to, you can never bring yourself to do it if it might stick.”

“You think me weak.”

“True. Ian. You good?”

He nods.

“Check on Ellie. I’m going to have a chat with the Skull.”

The Skull watches her approach. “I can withstand torture.”

“Oh, Johann. All you’ve put me through, and you think I would still only torture you if it meant getting information…”

* * *

Sharon is a person of her word. She hadn’t needed to torture the Skull to find the location of the Raft. All she needs for that are her computer skills. Honestly, one day she might be amused by how the Skull had underestimated her and her anger, but for now, she just wants to make things right and get Steve back.

By the same time the next day, Sharon is leading Ellie and Ian on a raid at the Raft. Most of the people in the cells look at her with distrust; given that she knows how Sharon was used to put them there, she can’t blame them. Maria in particular has some things to say when Sharon shows up outside Maria’s door.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sharon says, taking her time with the cell door. “Explain to me how I have LMDs, and how Faustus got his hands on one, would you?”

Maria goes silent and crosses her arms.

“Yeah,” Sharon repeats. She leaves the door open and goes to open more cells. At length, she finds the one she’s looking for. “You look like hell.”

He looks at her, his beard thick and unkempt, that familiar fighting spirit in his eyes. He looks at her with that same fight, and in that moment she knows that her LMD has visited him before. She doesn’t know what she does that makes him pause, but after a second, he does. “Sharon?”

“The real one this time.” She hesitates, her hand on the door. “You should know. I killed Faustus. And Crossbones. And the Skull. And I’m not sorry for any of it.”

He frowns. “I don’t believe it.”

“Do. Forgive me or don’t, that’s up to you.”

His frown deepens. “Of course I forgive you.”

After a moment, she opens his door, and he looks at her. “Were you going to leave me in here if I didn’t forgive you?” There’s something teasing to his voice, but a hint of something dark, too.

“No. But there’s more.” He moves out of the cell before she can close the door again. “Ian’s back.”

Steve waits for more. After the news that she’s killed several of his enemies, she isn’t surprised he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“He was in a universe where Hydra won. We had a daughter there. Ellie. We died there, and now she’s here.”

He stares at her. “We have a daughter?”

“And a son. Yes.” She holds out her hand. “Want to go meet them? Again?”

He watches her until she starts to wonder what the hell he’s trying to find in her face. She’s not an LMD, damn it. She should have tortured Faustus more before she killed him.

After far too long, Steve offers her his hand with a soft, almost uncertain smile. “I’d love to.”

She takes his hand but doesn’t start walking away yet. “Help me with the rest of these cells first, Pops.”

He raises an eyebrow even as he gets to work. “Pops?”

She shrugs and goes to the cell just past the one he’s working on. Great. Logan’s in this one, and he’s been sure to stink the place up. “I mean, they’ve been calling you Dad, but I think it would be kind of funny if they started calling you Pops…”

Steve shakes his head. “This isn’t how I pictured the rescue going.”

“Will you two shut up,” Logan growls. “Congratulations, but get me the fuck out of here.”

* * *

It takes months for things to settle down. In that time frame, Sharon is subjected to rounds upon rounds of interrogation. As far as anyone can tell, she’s completely innocent of tearing down the country and its infrastructure. She’d told them so, but they had needed proof that Crossbones and Sin, on the Skull’s orders, had stolen some of her LMDs from SHIELD storage and given them to Faustus to work with. (She has to admit to Steve she’s relieved her LMDs didn’t end up on the black market, and that Faustus hadn’t gotten them on his own.) It helps that Faustus had recorded the sessions, included his sessions with the real Sharon as she’d slept in his private hospital. She opts not to watch the recordings.

Some people don’t trust her any longer, but she can’t blame them. Not everyone likes that she killed Faustus, the Skull, or Crossbones. She _does_ blame them. Maybe, like Steve believes, they’ll return one day. But until then, Sharon gets to enjoy a semblance of peace.

Her and Steve’s apartment isn’t big enough for a family of four. They move into a condo in Manhattan so Steve can be closer to the Avengers, and Sharon reforms the Daughters of Liberty, bringing Ellie onto the team. Other than that and her forays into the field as Agent 13, she works on home-schooling Ellie and Ian on their current universe and anything else she can think they might need. Ellie, especially, seems to have culture shock, and Sharon helps her make a tribute to Ellie’s actual parents and sets her up with repeatedly-vetted therapists. Overall, though, she and Ian seem healthy and, dare she say it, happy.

It’s almost a year before she catches a glimpse of someone who looks like her on the street. Many of her LMDs are still missing. She frowns. Tracking down her LMDs isn’t what the Daughters of Liberty do, but she might be able to start up a task force. It would have to have people from multiple agencies and groups, though, not just mostly-free agents like in the Daughters of Liberty. Maybe the task force could even include mutants, who tend to be left out of anything that anyone SHIELD-related takes part in.

So she starts a new team, intersecting several communities and agencies. Shuri points out it’s more of a peace-keeping agency than most official agencies, given that the members have to work together and find common ground, but Sharon is too busy trying to keep everyone from killing each other as they work to pinpoint small threats and remove them before they get on someone else’s radar who can’t handle it. When she points out to Shuri that she’s putting more time into protecting the team from themselves than removing threats, Shuri only seems amused.

But she has to admit, the team _is_ a good one. Effective. And the X-Men – X-Ladies? - are better people than SHIELD and the Avengers give them credit for. As time goes on, she thinks that working together on the team is also helping team members accomplish tasks on their other teams.

When she tells Shuri, though, Shuri only laughs.

It’s a good life. She has a family, she has purpose, and she has some ass to kick. Who could ask for more?


End file.
